Many businesses are highly motivated to minimize or eliminate interruptions of services provided by the businesses to or for their customers. Otherwise, such interruptions may have significant negative consequences for such businesses, such as, for example, loss of customers, the threat of litigation, loss of reputation, and, ultimately, reductions in profit and a potential inability to continue operations of the business.
For example, any business which provides information technology (IT) resources, or which relies on IT resources, may wish to minimize or eliminate interruptions to business operations which may result from malfunctions of hardware and/or software associated with the IT resources. For example, businesses which sell goods or services over the Internet may rely on a plurality of servers used to respond to customer requests and to otherwise conduct transactions with customers over the Internet. If such servers malfunction (e.g., for example, during periods of high volume of demand, or due to power outages, overheating, or other physical constraints), such businesses may be limited in their ability to respond to customer requests and to conduct transactions with customers. Similarly, businesses which rely on IT resources or other physical resources to support front-end interactions with customers may experience negative consequences in their customer interactions as a result of back-end malfunctions or other difficulties in the availability of relevant resources.
Therefore, various types of analyses have been undertaken as part of efforts to quantify, and otherwise describe, an extent to which a business will be able to minimize or eliminate such interruptions to its operations. For example, such analysis techniques are used to attempt to quantify and describe threats to a continuity of business operations of a business, as well as associated probabilities that such threats may occur, an impact of such threats that do occur, and a type and extent of recovery actions that may be taken in response to the occurrence of continuity disruptions.
Unfortunately, such analysis techniques are often implemented on an essentially ad-hoc basis, with little or no formalized, repeatable approaches that can be widely or consistently applied across operations of one or more businesses. For example, human analysts who implement such techniques may proceed by manually creating graphical or written descriptions of relevant business operations and associated resources, and may thereafter attempt to quantify and describe the various factors referenced above which may be relevant to assessing a future continuity of the analyzed business operations. However, it may be difficult for such human analysts to consider and quantify the various relationships and dependencies between and among the various business operations and their underlying resources. As a result, the results of such analyses may be limited in their utility.
Moreover, even to the extent that such results are useful, it may occur that changes to the business operations and/or associated resources may require associated changes in the related continuity analysis. In such scenarios, even for relatively minimal or infrequent changes to the operations/resources, significant cost, time, and/or effort associated with the human analyst may be required in order to determine an impact of the changes on the associated continuity analysis. Consequently, it is often difficult for business providers and other interested parties to assess risks associated with potential disruptions of business operations, or to plan accordingly to account for such disruptions.